INTERVIEW BY NAT HENTOFF
PLAYBOY | MARCH 1966
GET THE FULL COMPILATION

PLAYBOY: “Popular songs,” you told a reporter last year, “are the only art form that describes the temper of the times. The only place where it’s happening is on the radio and records. That’s where the people hang out. It’s not in books; it’s not on the stage; it’s not in the galleries. All this art they’ve been talking about, it just remains on the shelf. It doesn’t make anyone happier.” In view of the fact that more people than ever before are reading books and going to plays and art galleries, do you think that statement is borne out by the facts?
DYLAN: Statistics measure quantity, not quality. The people in the statistics are people who are very bored. Art, if there is such a thing, is in the bathrooms; everybody knows that. To go to an art-gallery thing where you get free milk and doughnuts and where there is a rock-’n’-roll band playing: That’s just a status affair. I’m not putting it down, mind you; but I spend a lot of time in the bathroom. I think museums are vulgar. They’re all against sex. Anyhow, I didn’t say that people “hang out” on the radio, I said they get “hung up” on the radio.

PLAYBOY: You used to say that you wanted to perform as little as possible, that you wanted to keep most of your time to yourself. Yet you’re doing more concerts and cutting more records every year. Why? Is it the money?
DYLAN: Everything is changed now from before. Last spring, I guess I was going to quit singing. I was very drained, and the way things were going, it was a very draggy situation—I mean, when you do Everybody Loves You for Your Black Eye, and meanwhile the back of your head is caving in. Anyway, I was playing a lot of songs I didn’t want to play. I was singing words I didn’t really want to sing. I don’t mean words like “God” and “mother” and “President” and “suicide” and “meat cleaver.” I mean simple little words like “if” and “hope” and “you.” But Like a Rolling Stone changed it all; I didn’t care anymore after that about writing books or poems or whatever. I mean it was something that I myself could dig. It’s very tiring having other people tell you how much they dig you if you yourself don’t dig you. It’s also very deadly entertainment-wise. Contrary to what some scary people think, I don’t play with a band now for any kind of propaganda-type or commercial-type reasons. It’s just that my songs are pictures and the band makes the sound of the pictures.

PLAYBOY: Do you feel that acquiring a combo and switching from folk to folk-rock has improved you as a performer?
DYLAN: I’m not interested in myself as a performer. Performers are people who perform for other people. Unlike actors, I know what I’m saying. It’s very simple in my mind. It doesn’t matter what kind of audience reaction this whole thing gets. What happens on the stage is straight. It doesn’t expect any rewards or fines from any kind of outside agitators. It’s ultra-simple, and would exist whether anybody was looking or not.

As far as folk and folk-rock are concerned, it doesn’t matter what kind of nasty names people invent for the music. It could be called arsenic music, or perhaps Phaedra music. I don’t think that such a word as folk-rock has anything to do with it. And folk music is a word I can’t use. Folk music is a bunch of fat people. I have to think of all this as traditional music. Traditional music is based on hexagrams. It comes about from legends, Bibles, plagues, and it revolves around vegetables and death. There’s nobody that’s going to kill traditional music.
… cont’d 
It strikes me funny that people actually have the gall to think that I have some kind of fantastic imagination. It gets very lonesome. But anyway, traditional music is too unreal to die. It doesn’t need to be protected. Nobody’s going to hurt it. In that music is the only true, valid death you can feel today off a record player. But like anything else in great demand, people try to own it. It has to do with a purity thing. I think its meaninglessness is holy. Everybody knows that I’m not a folk singer.

PLAYBOY: Some of your old fans would agree with you—and not in a complimentary vein—since your debut with the rock-’n’-roll combo at last year’s Newport Folk Festival, where many of them booed you loudly for “selling out” to commercial pop tastes. The early Bob Dylan, they felt, was the “pure” Bob Dylan. How do you feel about it?
DYLAN: I was kind of stunned. But I can’t put anybody down for coming and booing; after all, they paid to get in. They could have been maybe a little quieter and not so persistent, though. There were a lot of old people there, too; lots of whole families had driven down from Vermont, lots of nurses and their parents, and well, like they just came to hear some relaxing hoedowns, you know, maybe an Indian polka or two. And just when everything’s going all right, here I come on, and the whole place turns into a beer factory. There were a lot of people there who were very pleased that I got booed. I saw them afterward. I do resent somewhat, though, that everybody that booed said they did it because they were old fans.

PLAYBOY: Americans or not, there were a lot of people who didn’t like your new sound. In view of this widespread negative reaction, do you think you may have made a mistake in changing your style?
DYLAN: A mistake is to commit a misunderstanding. There could be no such thing, anyway, as this action. Either people understand or they pretend to understand—or else they really don’t understand. What you’re speaking of here is doing wrong things for selfish reasons. I don’t know the word for that, unless it’s suicide. In any case, it has nothing to do with my music.

PLAYBOY: Let’s turn the question around: Why have you stopped composing and singing protest songs?
DYLAN: I’ve stopped composing and singing anything that has either a reason to be written or a motive to be sung. Don’t get me wrong, now. “Protest” is not my word. I’ve never thought of myself as such. The word “protest,” I think, was made up for people undergoing surgery. It’s an amusement-park word. A normal person in his righteous mind would have to have the hiccups to pronounce it honestly. The word “message” strikes me as having a hernia-like sound. It’s just like the word “delicious.” Also the word “marvelous.” You know, the English can say “marvelous” pretty good. They can’t say “raunchy” so good, though. Well, we each have our thing. Anyway, message songs, as everybody knows, are a drag. It’s only college newspaper editors and single girls under 14 that could possibly have time for them.

PLAYBOY: You’ve said you think message songs are vulgar. Why?
DYLAN: Well, first of all, anybody that’s got a message is going to learn from experience that they can’t put it into a song. I mean it’s just not going to come out the same message. After one or two of these unsuccessful attempts, one realizes that his resultant message, which is not even the same message he thought up and began with, he’s now got to stick by it; because, after all, a song leaves your mouth just as soon as it leaves your hands. Are you following me?

PLAYBOY: Oh, perfectly.

PLAYBOY: Would it be unfair to say, then, as some have, that you were motivated commercially rather than creatively in writing the kind of songs that made you popular?
DYLAN: All right, now, look. It’s not all that deep. It’s not a complicated thing. My motives, or whatever they are, were never commercial in the money sense of the word. It was more in the don’t-die-by-the-hacksaw sense of the word. I never did it for money. It happened, and I let it happen to me. There was no reason not to let it happen to me. I couldn’t have written before what I write now, anyway. The songs used to be about what I felt and saw. Nothing of my own rhythmic vomit ever entered into it. Vomit is not romantic. I used to think songs are supposed to be romantic. And I didn’t want to sing anything that was unspecific. Unspecific things have no sense of time. All of us people have no sense of time; it’s a dimensional hang-up. Anybody can be specific and obvious. That’s always been the easy way. The leaders of the world take the easy way. It’s not that it’s so difficult to be unspecific and less obvious; it’s just that there’s nothing, absolutely nothing, to be specific and obvious about. My older songs, to say the least, were about nothing. The newer ones are about the same nothing—only as seen inside a bigger thing, perhaps called the nowhere. But this is all very constipated. I do know what my songs are about.

PLAYBOY: And what’s that?
DYLAN: Oh, some are about four minutes; some are about five, and some, believe it or not, are about eleven or twelve.

PLAYBOY: Can’t you be a bit more informative?
DYLAN: Nope.

PLAYBOY: Let’s change the subject. As you know, it’s the age group from about 16 to 25 that listens to your songs. Why, in your opinion?
DYLAN: I don’t see what’s so strange about an age group like that listening to my songs. I’m hip enough to know that it ain’t going to be the 85-to-90-year-olds. If the 85-to-90-year-olds were listening to me, they’d know that I can’t tell them anything. The 16-to-25-year-olds, they probably know that I can’t tell them anything either—and they know that I know it. It’s a funny business. Obviously, I’m not an IBM computer any more than I’m an ashtray. I mean it’s obvious to anyone who’s ever slept in the back seat of a car that I’m just not a schoolteacher.

PLAYBOY: Still, thousands of young people look up to you as a kind of folk hero. Do you feel some sense of responsibility toward them?
DYLAN: I don’t feel I have any responsibility, no. Whoever it is that listens to my songs owes me nothing. How could I possibly have any responsibility to any kind of thousands? What could possibly make me think that I owe anybody anything who just happens to be there? I’ve never written any song that begins with the words “I’ve gathered you here tonight…” I’m not about to tell anybody to be a good boy or a good girl and they’ll go to heaven. I really don’t know what the people who are on the receiving end of these songs think of me, anyway. It’s horrible. I’ll bet Tony Bennett doesn’t have to go through this kind of thing. I wonder what Billy the Kid would have answered to such a question.

PLAYBOY: Some people might feel that you’re trying to cop out of fighting for the things you believe in.
DYLAN: Those would be people who think I have some sort of responsibility toward them. They probably want me to help them make friends. I don’t know. They probably either want to set me in their house and have me come out every hour and tell them what time it is, or else they just want to stick me in between the mattress. How could they possibly understand what I believe in?

PLAYBOY: Well, what do you believe in?
DYLAN: I already told you.

PLAYBOY: All right. Many of your folk-singing colleagues remain actively involved in the fight for civil rights, free speech and withdrawal from Vietnam. Do you think they’re wrong?
DYLAN: I don’t think they’re wrong, if that’s what they see themselves doing. But don’t think that what you’ve got out there is a bunch of little Buddhas all parading up and down. People that use God as a weapon should be amputated upon. You see it around here all the time: “Be good or God won’t like you, and you’ll go to hell.” Things like that. People that march with slogans and things tend to take themselves a little too holy. It would be a drag if they, too, started using God as a weapon.

PLAYBOY: As a college dropout in your freshman year, you seem to take a dim view of schooling in general, whatever the subject.
DYLAN: I really don’t think about it.

PLAYBOY: Well, have you ever had any regrets about not completing college?
DYLAN: That would be ridiculous. Colleges are like old-age homes; except for the fact that more people die in colleges than in old-age homes, there’s really no difference. People have one great blessing—obscurity—and not really too many people are thankful for it. Everybody is always taught to be thankful for their food and clothes and things like that, but not to be thankful for their obscurity. Schools don’t teach that; they teach people to be rebels and lawyers. I’m not going to put down the teaching system; that would be too silly. It’s just that it really doesn’t have too much to teach. Colleges are part of the American institution; everybody respects them. They’re very rich and influential, but they have nothing to do with survival. Everybody knows that.

PLAYBOY: Would you advise young people to skip college, then?
DYLAN: I wouldn’t advise anybody to do anything. I certainly wouldn’t advise somebody not to go to college; I just wouldn’t pay his way through college.

PLAYBOY: Don’t you think the things one learns in college can help enrich one’s life?
DYLAN: I don’t think anything like that is going to enrich my life, no—not my life, anyway. Things are going to happen whether I know why they happen or not. It just gets more complicated when you stick yourself into it. You don’t find out why things move. You let them move; you watch them move; you stop them from moving; you start them moving. But you don’t sit around and try to figure out why there’s movement—unless, of course, you’re just an innocent moron, or some wise old Japanese man. Out of all the people who just lay around and ask “Why?”, how many do you figure really want to know?

PLAYBOY: Can you suggest a better use for the four years that would otherwise be spent in college?
DYLAN: Well, you could hang around in Italy; you could go to Mexico; you could become a dishwasher; you could even go to Arkansas. I don’t know; there are thousands of things to do and places to go. Everybody thinks that you have to bang your head against the wall, but it’s silly when you really think about it. I mean, here you have fantastic scientists working on ways to prolong human living, and then you have other people who take it for granted that you have to beat your head against the wall in order to be happy. You can’t take everything you don’t like as a personal insult. I guess you should go where your wants are bare, where you’re invisible and not needed.

PLAYBOY: Today, you’re on your way to becoming a millionaire. Do you feel in any danger of being trapped by all this affluence—by the things it can buy?
DYLAN: No, my world is very small. Money can’t really improve it any; money can just keep it from being smothered.

PLAYBOY: If fortune hasn’t trapped you, how about fame? Do you find that your celebrity makes it difficult to keep your private life intact?
DYLAN: My private life has been dangerous from the beginning. All this does is add a little atmosphere.

PLAYBOY: You told an interviewer last year, “I’ve done everything I ever wanted to.” If that’s true, what do you have to look forward to?
DYLAN: Salvation. Just plain salvation.

PLAYBOY: Anything else?
DYLAN: Praying. I’d also like to start a cookbook magazine. And I’ve always wanted to be a boxing referee. I want to referee a heavyweight championship fight. Can you imagine that? Can you imagine any fighter in his right mind recognizing me?

PLAYBOY: If your popularity were to wane, would you welcome being anonymous again?
DYLAN: You mean welcome it, like I’d welcome some poor pilgrim coming in from the rain? No, I wouldn’t welcome it; I’d accept it, though. Someday, obviously, I’m going to have to accept it.

PLAYBOY: Do you ever think about marrying, settling down, having a home, maybe living abroad? Are there any luxuries you’d like to have, say, a yacht or a Rolls-Royce?
DYLAN: No, I don’t think about those things. If I felt like buying anything, I’d buy it. What you’re asking me about is the future, my future. I’m the last person in the world to ask about my future.

PLAYBOY: Are you saying you’re going to be passive and just let things happen to you?
DYLAN: Well, that’s being very philosophical about it, but I guess it’s true.